


Toiling Upward in the Night

by ainsley



Category: Jekyll
Genre: Gen, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 01:59:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ainsley/pseuds/ainsley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A glimpse into Miranda's and Min's minds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toiling Upward in the Night

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [](http:)idella for the brilliant last-minute beta!
> 
> I couldn't resist incorporating a bit of the musical _Jekyll and Hyde_, so thanks also go to Leslie Bricusse for the song "Someone Like You" (source of the line "there'd be a new way to live, a new life to love", which I altered slightly).

_The heights by great men reached and kept  
Were not attained by sudden flight,  
But they, while their companions slept,  
Were toiling upward in the night._  
\--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

* * *

Min was filing. Rainy Tuesday afternoons weren't fit for much else. It never took more than an hour, and took that long only on the rare occasions that she had a month's backlog of billing, photographs, and other detritus of the sort investigators gathered by the handful.

Her back was to the door, arse up as she bent best she could to reach the bottom shelf without waking the baby, when Claire Jackman walked through the door.

Min had grown bored with cases like Claire's within weeks of her hire, but following potentially wayward spouses was the lifeblood of any private detective; dull, certainly, but one had to eat.

She jotted a few notes before sending Claire into Miranda's office: 'wife whiny and pampered, used to having things go her way. twenty quid he's cheating; can't say that I blame him. a looker, but a right frigid bitch, most likely.'

::

Investigate people long enough, and all the cases begin to look the same. People only fuck around in a small number of ways. Dirty laundry smells, sure, but it's one smell and the stench dissipates when you air it long enough.

Miranda read Min's notes, chuckling inwardly at Min's assessment. Min had raised the stakes in their long-running series of bets, but Miranda took it anyway; Claire's description of Dr Jackman piqued her insatiable curiosity.

::

Of course they took the money. What option was there, really? Miranda could stop following Jackman and become wealthy by not working - always a good thing, and more so with parenthood soon arriving. Or she could decline and be bumped off the case; she doubted, though, that anyone offering so much money would stop at merely blocking her investigation.

The money stopped her from watching Jackman in the future; his past wasn't part of the deal.

::

The Jackman case had looked the same as every other case with a philandering husband - for the first three days. But as Miranda had never seen a cheating spouse stick so rigidly to a schedule, she knew she'd landed a case worth investigating. She continued taking photos for Claire, of course, but spent far more time than strictly necessary monitoring the whereabouts and activities of Claire's husband.

At first she thought the men she saw entering and exiting the flat were brothers; she had no idea what they did there, however, or why they followed such a rigid schedule. Eventually she noticed that she never saw them together, that the younger one always exited shortly after the older entered, and that he was around far less often than Tom. He also appeared all id, whereas Tom's id seemed curiously absent. All work and no play, yet anything but dull.

::

It was such a strange case that Miranda started talking to Min about it, over dinner or late at night. Over leftover curry the Monday after Claire came into their office, Min said that the two men, looking so much alike but acting so dissimilarly, sounded 'a lot like that story. You know, that Jekyll and Hyde one.'

At first Miranda didn't think much of it; a lot of people were Janus-faced. But the rigid schedule and way they were never together, with one so repressed and the other so wild, prompted her to reread the novella.

The next morning she hurriedly tossed her battered sixth-form copy into her bag, planning to read it whilst watching Tom that afternoon; she was glad to be sitting when she saw the cover a few hours later. Miranda Callender didn't believe in coincidences, but had no idea how to explain the astonishing resemblance.

::

Utterson. She hadn't recovered from the shock when she started reading, and the novella's second word just compounded it. Tom Jackman's employer was a corporation called Klein and Utterson.

It couldn't be coincidence. But had the corporation named itself after the lawyer in Stevenson's novella? Did Klein and Utterson predate Jekyll and Hyde?

Or - and this, Miranda thought later, is when events became truly creepy - was the lawyer a real person who helped start the company?

::

They came in the night, three men, large and armed, dressed in black. Min had worked late, waiting for Miranda to finish following a wayward wife; the men arrived not five minutes after Miranda's return. The two had been finishing up, were nearly ready to don their coats and head home. The men entered (Miranda left the door unlocked, expecting to soon exit), brushed past Min, and walked into Miranda's office as though expected, invited.

::

Someone else entered whilst Min was in the loo; the baby decided to squish her bladder at the most inopportune moments. Miranda said nothing about the fourth person, gave away no details other than his or her existence. Fourth was the one to offer the money. It took surprisingly little time for Miranda to agree to the polite request backed by unspoken threats, having instantly seen the loophole.

The money guaranteed their solvency for at least two decades, more if they continued working. Min asked Miranda what she had seen that warranted such a sizable payoff. At first she was amused that she'd been right about Jackman being like Jekyll, but then she grasped some of the implications of that discovery. They'd be watched, naturally, to ensure Miranda's compliance with the terms of the agreement. That kept her safely away from Hyde, but would it keep Hyde away from them?

::

Fact became fiction became fact; Jekyll was Jackman, Jackman Jekyll and Hyde. The man without issue had a descendant, who married the clone of his forefather's maid. Klein and Utterson's money could not buy silence; the truth could, as who would believe it? This Jekyll, Jackman, had a happy ending, as happy as an ending could be following such a tale. Miranda and Min had no such ending; for them, the strange case of Jackman and Jackman was but a beginning. There was a new way to live, a new life to love; happily ever after became a beautiful start.


End file.
